After the war, what's next for Gaza?

The brutal events of Oct. 7 merely resurface the inconvenient question of what will happen to Gaza. It is a question people have been asking since the Oslo Accords, and certainly since 2006, when the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party lost control of Gaza to its Hamas rivals.

At that time, Hamas was campaigning on the promise to reform the Palestinian Authority. The Bush administration initially took a conciliatory approach toward the victors, with President George W. Bush stating that Hamas “ran on the campaign, ‘We’re going to get rid of corruption’ and that ‘we’re going to provide services to the people,’ and that’s positive.”

Sadly, that was all in vain. The PA was violently ousted from Gaza by Hamas the following year, and the descent toward Oct. 7 began.

One of the factors leading to this point was Arafat’s unwillingness to confront the rejectionists at the height of his power and popularity after Oslo. Then, as the clock on the Interim Agreement began winding down without sufficient progress toward a comprehensive peace deal, Arafat opted for a mirage of internal unity over a necessary confrontation to pacify his detractors. This gave Hamas and its allies breathing space to hone their message and their craft.

A second critical factor has been the failure of the international community to hold the Palestinian Authority, under both Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas, accountable to its governance obligations under the Oslo framework.

This led to Hamas’s electoral win in 2006. Palestinians were fed up with the PA’s numerous failings, corruption topping the list. Fifteen years past the expiration of his electoral mandate, Abbas's and the PA's diminished public standing are legacies of this failure. 

It wasn’t meant to be this way. According to the Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn, “[t]he governing system in Palestine shall be a democratic parliamentary system, based upon political and party pluralism. The President of the National Authority shall be directly elected by the people. The government shall be accountable to the President and to the Palestinian Legislative Council.”

In 1997, the Basic Law, drafted and passed by the first elected Palestinian Legislative Council, went even further in codifying the governing characteristics of the fledging Palestinian entity that most Palestinians favored. According to the law, the “people are the source of power, which shall be exercised through the legislative, executive and judicial authorities, based upon the principle of separation of powers.” It also codified basic rights, including freedom of expression. “Freedom of opinion may not be prejudiced," it said. "Every person shall have the right to express his opinion and to circulate it orally, in writing or in any form of expression or art.”

Given the law's aim to place checks on the executive, it wasn’t a surprise that Arafat refused to ratify it until 2002, literally under the gun.

Despite the ambition of Oslo that Palestinians “may govern themselves according to democratic principles,” security was a competing priority for the U.S. in its relationship with the PA from the very beginning. The spasmodic 2000 to 2005 violence known as the Second Intifada, which was not unrelated to internal frustrations with the PA, followed by Fatah’s ballot box debacle in 2006, tipped the scales irreversibly. From there, the perceived need to bolster the good PA against the bad Hamas led to security considerations trumping all else, despite the irrefutable link between stability and good governance.

As the Biden administration tries to chart a way forward for all parties to the current conflict, the option into which billions have already been invested over 30 years — a legitimate, popularly elected Palestinian Authority, bolstered by an active civil society, wherein human rights and universal values are upheld — is now a discredited, crony-authoritarian order that reflects more the models of Arafat’s and Abbas’s Arab, one-party, presidential political mentors than the aspirations of Palestinians.

For those in the U.S. foreign policy establishment today who might believe that a revitalized Palestinian Authority is the answer and merely an election and a few reforms away, let January 2006 be a cautionary tale.

The decades-long neglect of Palestinian governance has left a generation of Palestinians (70 percent under the age of 35) with few, if any, of the internal reference points or experiences of the generation before, whose aspirations Arafat and his successors viewed as a threat. Re-empowering Palestinians in their quest for good governance — an urgent priority integral to any plan for long term security and stability for all involved — will likely require some risk-taking. But ultimately, it will demand time, resources, commitment, and patience, all of which are often found wanting in our foreign policy toolkit.

Owen Kirby is director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Republican Institute and a former senior adviser in the State Department's Office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative.